Exhale
by nicholasmage
Summary: Spades Slick has took a hit meant for Miss Paint, and his last breath is upon him.


Your name is Spades Slick and this was not supposed to happen.

You thought it was a good move, keeping Die's doll. You thought you were doing the right thing when you took over control of the band of green guys. They seemed happy enough under new management, but you suspected they were just too stupid to know any better. To know that their so-called new leader had no idea what he was doing, or worse, the wrong ideas. He had, as he had recently come to understand, alot of those. The worst part was that he really had thought things were gonna work out, that they were gonna defeat that bastard Lord English and make everything up to then justified. You thought all the pain, all the death was finally gonna mean something, lead to something good. Because of you. Because you thought you were a leader, someone that had the power to change things for the better.

You thought wrong.

You remember waking up in that bed feeling so different, and not just because of the robotic alterations. For three years something was growing inside you, being nurtured and fed. Something you hadn't had for a long time, not since back on Derse if you were being honest. While you sat in that bed, being taken care of by that idiot orange guy, Andrew you think his name was, you didn't feel as helpless as you should have. Not as needy. No, for the first time in a long time, you felt you had something ahead of you. You had no memory of the past couple years, you were a blank slate with so many possibilites. You thought you could make a future you could control, that your fate and the fate of those around you could be influenced in a good way, instead of falling into the inevitable destruction that you only now are remembering. No matter what you ever did in the past, it always amounted to nothing, to suffering and calamity. You thought it was gonna change when you built the city back then, when you became a mobster. You thought you had power and that you were gonna have that power forever and finally prove you were not a pawn to be used.

You thought damn wrong.

Your eyes are closed and you feel the cold ground beneath you. You feel some kind of discomfort in your chest, with a warm feeling spreading all around you. You put a hand on your chest and it's just slick with that damn blood, the red slime that ran threw your veins which now is leaving you so easily. Blood, you knew, didn't have such attachments to it's home. You feel around with your robotic hand, it's a miracle you can feel anything at all with this metal skin, but you come to the source of the outpouring. Theres a damn hole through your chest, you realize, right where your heart is. How fucking fitting, you think, and would almost laugh bitterly if you weren't so dizzy. Another big fuck-you from whatever the hell made reality the way it was, adding another ironic joke that nobody was laughing at because you'd heard it too many times, ringing forever in your ears and inside your head like after firing a gun. Ha, more fucking jokes, more twisted black humor to distract yourself from what was happening, because you did not want to believe it could just end like this, so easily. You never wanted to believe it, because again, when you woke up in that bed you had so much _hope. _Hope for yourself, hope for everybody, hope for life itself. Hope that it didn't all turn out to be like how you saw it now, with hope being turned into some sick cosmic joke that was played on you again and again untill you heard the punchline.

You muse over all this when you notice your wet not only on your torso, but your face. But this is a different wetness, not sticky and thick but warm, tiny droplets laning on your forehead and nose. They're tears, you realize, and not yours. You summon the strength to open your eyes and what you see would make your heart break if you believed you had one. That Prospitian woman, that kind and caring little dame that had cared for you and added to the hope you used to have, was bawling her black little eyes out over your prone body, big hiccuping sobs that racked through her tiny body. You try to reach a hand to her face, but find it's become so, so difficult to move at all with your life draining out of you. The last of your non-existent heart is leaking out of you, and you suspect some of hers is too with the way she cries. You had hope for her, for you and her. You'd never met someone like her before, someone that made you feel so at ease, somehow peaceful despite the impending doom that was before everyone and everything in existence now that you had failed. That's why you had intervened and got the shot meant for her from English's gun. You close your eyes again, you can't bear to see her that way. You can't watch her hope shattering because of you, now that she knows there is nothing left and reality itself is at stake because you failed. You failed everybody and everything. The green guys, who really weren't that bad and who you were growing fond of. The players, a bunch of kids who got their own futures taken away from them since the game began. Your friends, your best friends who were dead and gone because you fucked up time after time and was unable to have any control of their fate or yours. And you failed _her._ God, you can't even bring yourself to think her name because you think it will rip whatever is keeping you together apart, like the end of the universe all over again inside your head and in that heart you swear you don't have. You knew she had believed in you in her own way, so much so that she went to her death happily by your hand.

You wonder if she felt this way when she was dying, with a hole in her chest and her blood leaving without a care, like it hadn't lived inside of her for centuries. You wonder if she was as afraid as you are, or even more considering she had noone to stay and weep for her end, to show that they cared. Though the universe wouldn't end with your death, you knew it was just a matter of time. There was no way they'd defeat Lord English after you fucked up so badly, you likely took away any chance at the salvation of realtiy. So you will die, and after awhile, there will be nothing and noone left. You only hope that there is some semblence of an afterlife so you can see your friends again, see her again and everyone else that you failed. Tell them that you are sorry, so sorry you couldn't manage to be anything more than a pawn with the hopes of a king.

As the last of your life seeps from your aching heart that you are starting to suspect you might have had all along, you feel a cool breeze hit your wet cheeks, a last bit of comfort that carries in it just a tiny thread of the hope of so many years long had.

Your name is Spades Slick and you hope that maybe, just maybe, the rush of air that hits your face isn't a sigh of despair but a laugh, a laugh not at the misfortunate happenings that forever will be present in reality, but one of triumph. You think that's a nice thing to hope for, one final thought before you say goodbye silently and your lips curve into a crooked smile, hoping fate will smile back and you will have made a difference after all.


End file.
